Overview

Stoneybrooke Christian Schools, based in Southern California, comprises three schools on two campuses. They instruct, instill, insulate and inspire the lives of over 650 students.

Like many Novell school districts, Stoneybrooke Christian Schools needed a more efficient way to import and manage their student accounts as students progress through their education. While free Novell user
management tools are available * UIMPORT, ICE, GWImport, LDIF and others * they are restricted, missing features and can be complex to use.

The Challenge

Before discovering EMU, Stoneybrooke Christian Schools was faced with the challenge of "data input, data input and more data input" * plus the inevitable human error and lost productivity that results from
manually entering data.

"Entering student and staff information into NDS / eDirectory takes lots of time," says Kevin Garibaldi, Stoneybrooke's IT Manager. "You can't just put a parent volunteer in front of ConsoleOne and say, 'Here's where you click for this, make sure you don't click there, and so on."

"ConsoleOne is meant for IT personnel who are trained and qualified to use it, which limits the task to just myself," continues Garibaldi. "I certainly don't have the time to import and manage hundreds of student logins, directories and passwords manually."

"Before using EMU, I balked at the idea of giving students access to our NetWare servers given the additional IT management requirements. Now students can access files and other resources on our NetWare servers and use USB memory keys to store files."

"The best feature of EMU is that I can take a simple text file with a list of students or staff from our school administration software, import it directly into NDS / eDirectory and COMPLETELY customize the information before it becomes live on the network."

"Since schools have students coming and going, our users change every year. It's much easier to 'wipe the slate clean' and do a full re-import of student accounts once each year begins."

The Results

"This is one of the few programs I can say works 100%," reports Kevin Garibaldi. "Because it automates the process of user creation and management, there are very few, if any, human errors that are made.
Misspelled names, forgetting to set directory permissions, having to create hundreds of passwords, etc. are a thing of the past. I simply don't run into those problems anymore."